Jobyna Howland (1880-1936) was a stage actor who made occasional film appearances.
Howland made her debut aged 17, and performed widely in regional and touring productions, before working on Broadway, where she played her final role shortly before her death.
She made a few silent films, but sound catered better to her theatrical skills and, in particular, her resonant voice. She was a regular in the comedies of Wheeler and Wolsey.
Howland made only one musical at MGM, playing Josephine in A Lady’s Morals.
Wallace Fitzgerald Beery (1885-1949) shares with Edward G Robinson the honour of being the 1930s’ most unlikely-looking star/leading man. Beery was, during his heyday, successfully marketed by MGM as a lovable slob, but seems to have been disliked by virtually everyone he worked with, for his constant upstaging and unpleasant behaviour. Jackie Cooper, who worked with him four times when a child actor, claimed they, after Beery died, they “couldn’t find eight guys to carry his casket”.
Wallace Beery was that rare entertainer who actually did run away from home to join the circus. A few years later he began stage work, singing in comic operas, and then on Broadway and in summer stock.
He made his first film, for Essanay, in 1913, the first of more than 200 appearances. He also directed a number of shorts for Essanay and for Nestor Pictures between 1913 and 1919.
Beery specialized in playing villains during the 1920s, though one of his more prominent roles was as King Richard in Fairbanks’s Robin Hood (1922). And in 1925 he was cast as Professor Challenger in First National’s The Lost World.
MGM signed Beery as a character actor, but he unexpectedly became a leading man after being teamed with Marie Dressler in Min and Bill (1930). He won the Academy Award for Best Actor for The Champ (1931), tying with Fredric March (who had actually received a higher number of votes).
Beery appeared three times in MGM musicals. In A Lady’s Morals, he had a supporting role as P T Barnum. In Going Hollywood, he features in archival footage at a premiere. And in A Date with Judy, his penultimate picture, he was top billed as Elizabeth Taylor’s dad.
Mary Willie Grace Moore (1898-1947), ‘the Tennessee Nightingale’, is thought of as an opera singer who, like Lawrence Tibbett, was enticed to Hollywood and a lower form of musical entertainment. In fact, Grace Moore was no stranger to performing popular songs. She had funded her training by singing in nightclubs, and made appearances in Broadway revues in the early 20s, well before she made her 1928 debut at the Metropolitan Opera.
Moore’s ambition in going to Hollywood, she said later, was to “help carve a niche for good music in the then-developing field of sound pictures”. So ‘The Tennessee Nightingale’ went to play Jenny Lind, ‘the Swedish Nightingale’, in A Lady’s Morals. The only thing worse than the film’s title, Moore claimed, was her acting. If her acting was not everything that might be desired, it was so in two languages, as she also starred in the French-language version.
Moore and Tibbett were subsequently paired in New Moon, and then she called it a day on screen acting and went back to the stage. With the downturn in the popularity of film musicals, she was in the wrong place at the wrong time.
Moore returned to Hollywood in 1934, and made six pictures for Columbia, including the very successful One Night of Love (1934). She made her ninth and final film in France, Louise (1939), directed by Abel Gance.
Grace Moore’s life and career ended tragically in 1947 when she died in a plane crash. She was later portrayed by Kathryn Grayson in Warner’s lacklustre biopic, So This is Love (1953).
The film career of Natalie Visart (1910-86) is inextricably linked to Cecil B DeMille. She was a friend of his daughter Katharine, joining her in uncredited revelry in the zeppelin in Madam Satan.
Visart later began a relationship with the future director Mitchell Leisen, who designed costumes for DeMille’s films, working with him on The Sign of the Cross (1932). He secured for her the role of costume designer on The Plainsman (1936), and she went on to carry out that function on five more of DeMille’s pictures. She also worked for Frank Capra, designing for Barbara Stanwyck’s character in Meet John Doe (1941).
Visart’s work was highly-respected, but she gave up her career after marrying in 1946.
Kasha Haroldi (1907-92) was an actor who arguably received the most publicity for being, for a few years, the sister-in-law of Joan Crawford.
Haroldi made her first appearance on screen in 1923 and the last in 1938. With the possible exception of Wesley Ruggles’s version of The Age of Innocence (1924), the only film she was associated with to feature in the history books is Madam Satan, in which, like so many others, she played one of the wives of Henry VIII.
Mary McAlister [sic] (1908-91) was ‘Little Mary McAlister’, one of America’s first child stars.
She made her first appearance in 1915 for Essanay, and starred in Sadie Goes to Heaven (1917) two years later.
McAllister worked regularly up until 1928, when talking pictures slowed down her adult career. She retired following an uncredited appearance in Madam Satan.
Someone called Natalie Storm (1905-??), apparently born in Durban, South Africa, may have been in Hollywood during 1930 and appeared as one of Henry VIII’s wives in Madam Satan.
